Editorials

The California Supreme Court has upheld most of Proposition 66, the initiative to speed up the death penalty, but in doing so may have made an even more tangled mess of it. Associate Justice Carol Corrigan, writing for the majority, said voters were presented with ballot materials promising a five-year time limit on death penalty appeals in state courts, but there is “no workable means of enforcing the five-year review limit.

The Trump administration’s announcement that the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program will be rescinded should prompt needed congressional action to protect young immigrants whose sole offense was being brought here by their parents.

In 2015, our colleagues in the Daily Breeze newsroom won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for an investigation that exposed the excessive salary and unusual perks of the chief of a school district serving Hawthorne and Lawndale.

The Trump administration deserves great praise for ending Operation Choke Point, the controversial, and often tyrannical, program that harmed many legitimate businesses. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation set the stage for the discriminatory treatment of businesses when it declared certain industries to be engaged in “high-risk” activities, sending a strong signal to the banks it regulates that they should steer clear of doing business with these entities.

In 2005, the Los Angeles Unified School District school board set the ambitious target of requiring all students to graduate eligible to attend a four-year college. The board gave the district a decade to fully implement the plan.

Amid a concerted campaign by teachers unions to undermine school choice, national support for charter schools has taken a hit. According to the results of an annual survey by the K-12 education journal Education Next, only

In times of crisis, Americans must set aside geographic and political differences and unite to help their fellow human beings. Hurricane Harvey, the first Category 4 hurricane to hit the United States in more than a decade, has devastated communities across southeast Texas.

President Trump granted a pardon on Friday to Joe Arpaio, the former and longtime sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz. It wasn’t much of a surprise. The president had signaled his intent to pardon the controversial 85-year-old lawman in a campaign rally three days earlier in Phoenix, the seat of Maricopa County.

By The Editorial Board Five years ago, Los Angeles County voters decided it was necessary to require the use of condoms in adult film productions by passing Measure B. The only real winners since the passage of Measure B have been lawyers and moralists.

On Monday, President Trump lifted Obama-era restrictions on the federal 1033 Program that distributes surplus military equipment to local police departments. Trump’s executive order speciously characterizes the move as merely “restoring state, tribal, and local law enforcement’s access to life-saving equipment and resources.

The one thing most everyone expected from the White House this year — a big new infrastructure deal — now looks dead in the water. How bad a setback is it? “Infrastructure Week” wrapped up with President Donald Trump pulling the plug on his own Advisory Council on Infrastructure.

While politicians across California seem content to ignore the problem, both the cost and excesses of public sector pensions continue to grow. Last year, nearly 23,000 retired government workers receiving a pension through the California Public Employees’ Retirement System collected pensions of at least $100,000, according to watchdog group Transparent California.

Police officers in California killed 157 people in 2016, according to a recently released report from the state Attorney General’s Office, with one-third of fatal incidents occurring in Los Angeles County.

Environmentalists are once again standing in the way of the Newhall Ranch development in the Santa Clarita Valley. Two environmental groups have filed suit against Los Angeles County and the developer over the Board of Supervisors’ vote to allow two of five planned segments of the development to proceed.

The latest terror attack perpetrated by the Islamic State — this time against the civilians of Barcelona — makes two harsh facts painfully clear. First, the strategy of confronting international terrorism as a global policing problem just isn’t working well enough.

After a long review of America’s disappointing military strategy in Afghanistan, President Trump announced a new plan that’s light on details and heavy on familiar messaging. It’s a far cry from the big change many in the administration — and many Americans — had been pulling for.

There are some indications that Clifford Rechtschaffen, one of Gov. Jerry Brown’s two latest appointments to the state Public Utilities Commission, would be more of an advocate for utilities than for consumers, ratepayers and those adversely affected by environmental issues.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s proposal to launch a pilot program testing the use of drones has understandably been met with skepticism and outright opposition. On Aug. 8, the department told the Board of Police Commissioners about the idea, sparking debate about the use of drones.

It would be an understatement to describe President Trump’s comments this past week in the aftermath of racist rallies and ensuing violence in Charlottesville as tone deaf. His initial response gave enough reason to shudder but on Thursday, in an all-too-familiar barrage of tweets, he sadly accented his already troubling response to a volatile situation by lamenting the loss of “beautiful statues and monuments.

The Dodgers are having one of the greatest seasons baseball fans have ever seen. Unfortunately, for many in Los Angeles, it’s the greatest season they’ve never seen. This is the fourth year since the Dodgers sold their local television rights for $8.

An innovative, off-stream water storage proposal northeast of Sacramento should be one of the top priorities for the state’s spending of Proposition 1 water-bond money. The Sites Reservoir project would, in wet years, divert “excess” water from the Sacramento River into what would be the seventh-largest reservoir in California.

Public-private partnerships in space travel hold much promise, and greater cost-efficiency, but government should be transparent about the risks and inevitable failures. On Monday, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, conducted a successful launch of a resupply mission to the International Space Station, or ISS, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the company’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket returning safely to SpaceX’s landing zone at Cape Canaveral.

One thing all Americans should be able to agree on is that it’s time for a change of course in Afghanistan. Our current path is untenable. The Obama administration didn’t deliver the seeming victory that propelled him to a second term in office.

The proposal to expand the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is back — and no better than ever. Senate Constitutional Amendment 12, moving through the California Legislature, is a little different from previous plans that were rejected by state lawmakers and L.

Los Angeles is about to sign a contract with the International Olympic Committee to host the 2028 Olympics without knowing what the Games will cost, making future city taxpayers responsible for covering potential cost overruns.

Something the Trump and Obama administrations agree on: occupational licensing laws need to be reformed. In a speech delivered July 21, U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta called on state legislators to reform occupational licensing laws which, he argues, are too often used “to limit competition, bar entry, or create a privileged class.

All who support journalism’s constitutional check on the government should push back against U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ threat to make it easier to subpoena reporters. After being excoriated by President Trump for being “very weak” on executive branch leaks, Sessions pledged Friday to rein in unauthorized disclosures of information by government officials.

Retailers, shippers and consumers breathed a sigh of relief as a first-of-its-kind contract extension was approved by dockworkers at all West Coast ports. The extension, ensuring labor peace at 29 ports in California, Oregon and Washington until 2022, was hailed by management and union officials who wanted to avoid labor strife that devastated the economy in 2014-15.

With the U.S. Treasury exhausting its current borrowing capacity in October, House Republicans should follow the Trump administration’s lead and lift the debt ceiling — without tacking on any conditions, no matter how well-intentioned.

Wednesday, Aug. 16, is the annual National Tell a Joke Day. Americans sure could use more levity right now. So we’re taking a break from our weekly tradition of asking readers for their opinions on serious issues.

The federal government should not intrude on Washington, D.C.’s Death with Dignity Act, as some members of Congress would like to do. Depriving terminally ill adults in D.C. the option of medical aid-in-dying would not only condemn many to unnecessary suffering, but provide an unwarranted precedent for further intrusions on states with similar laws.

The L.A. political scandal of the summer is back on the agenda. Wednesday, the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees is scheduled to try again to decide what to do about allegations that one member, Scott Svonkin, has been bullying another, Andra Hoffman.

Legislative leaders have promised to tackle housing affordability when they return to session later this month. They need to make a concerted, successful effort to relieve some of the regulations that enable not-in-my-backyard-ism and stymie housing construction — and not just pile on more taxes.

Misconduct by prosecutors in Southern California has led to dozens of criminal convictions being overturned on appeal — that’s the finding from a new study by Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project, which looked at court rulings on prosecutorial misconduct across the country.

The struggle between technology and privacy is not new, but it takes on enhanced importance when it comes to government policing activities. Law enforcement agencies are already pushing the constitutional envelope through their use of technology in a number of areas.

A pair of protest marches by San Fernando Valley residents on opposing sides of the homelessness issue Tuesday showed how the tone has changed in discussion of the crisis. Whether these were steps in the right direction will depend on how public officials respond.

The evidence is mounting that e-cigarettes help people quit smoking, so why do state and local governments keep banning them or regulating them like tobacco products? The latest research on the effects of e-cigarette use comes from a study, published in the British Medical Journal, of more than 160,000 Americans over a 14-year period.

In a speech delivered July 20, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten characterized the school choice movement as merely an outgrowth of segregationist policies. Across the country, students, parents and teachers have seen the benefits of school choice.

The major political parties have been going through some soul-searching since the surprise election of Donald Trump — even Trump’s own Republican Party. Last week, as Democratic leaders rolled out a repackaged economic agenda, we invited readers to send us their opinions about

At a time of tremendous frustration, one of the most daunting and unwelcome challenges facing the Trump administration is the war in Afghanistan. President Obama won an election he could have lost as a direct result of campaigning on what appeared to be victory in that conflict, with Osama bin Laden dead and troop levels on track to draw down.

Is the Senate filibuster a useful emergency brake on the actions of legislative majorities, or is it a heckler’s veto that distorts the legislative process and prevents the effective functioning of government? The 60-vote requirement to cut off debate isn’t in the Constitution.

Setting an agenda for his new term as president of the Los Angeles City Council, Herb Wesson has emphasized the importance of making Los Angeles a beacon of light in the fight against hatred and intolerance.

A bill to provide badly needed reform to California’s overly generous teacher tenure rules sailed through the Assembly, but was scuttled by union influence. Assembly Bill 1220, introduced by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, a former school board president and college professor, would have extended teacher tenure decisions to three years from the current two (although, in practice, teachers receive tenure after just 18 months since decisions must be made months before the end of their second year of teaching).

Who says bipartisanship in Congress is dead? Well, it’s on life support, sure, as this week’s almost entirely party-line Senate vote on reviving the health-care debate showed. Like the entirely party-line vote in the House and Senate that set up Obamacare in the first place.

Government isn’t exactly known for its efficiency, and California is no exception to high costs and bloated bureaucracies. Why should it be any different for food stamps? The number of beneficiaries in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, administered by the states and known as CalFresh in California, shot up during the Great Recession, and continued to increase dramatically for several years afterward during the anemic economic recovery.